


Citoyen Robespierre

by antirococo_reaction (orphan_account)



Series: Oh Ye Women of Sparta [2]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Sexism, Pressure to marry/love, Societal expectations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 08:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20561360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/antirococo_reaction
Summary: There are times, it seems to Éléonore, when it feels as though her life is divided into two perfectly distinct parts: the years before his arrival, and the years following it. Others will tell a simple story: a virtuous girl falls in love with the man she idealises. The reality is far more complicated, and not at all what most people mean when they say 'love'.





	Citoyen Robespierre

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Readers,
> 
> I honestly don't know how to tag this fic, or this series, at times. I've gone with F/M only because of the explicit discussion of the pressure that Éléonore feels to love, and eventually marry, Robespierre- I feel like tagging it Gen wouldn't be entirely accurate, in that light.
> 
> There is also, by the way, a non-romance focused [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2TziPX3n9uI9T517GBVfW4?si=uuonzF4xQs-yHRnV6qG0Pg) that accompanies this series, because I rarely work without music.
> 
> Also, this series is basically an extended birthday gift for [billspilledquill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill).

There are times, it seems to Éléonore, when it feels as though her life is divided into two perfectly distinct parts: the years before his arrival, and the years following it.

Everyone will suppose it something as simple and uncomplicated as the love one always finds in novels and plays, in poems and operas. Another iteration of a too-familiar story: here is the naive, virtuous girl who meets a great man- or, as most modern tellings go, a terrible villain- and is swept up upon the great wave of her emotions, drawn into his depths by a violent tide, there to drown far from the girl who once stood upon the shores of love. For this, now that the violent days of the Directory and the _jeunesse dorée_ and even Napoléon himself are being swept aside, now that the world is in a slightly more forgiving mood, she receives some small measure of pity from it. The world only understands the folly of a girl in love, they neither need nor care for the truth of the story. If anyone were to ask Éléonore, however, she would say this: Robespierre came into their midst like the spring, a sweetness and a violence, a warmth amongst the tempest. Robespierre created, and Robespierre destroyed. They all did, those kind, ferocious, long-dead men: with nothing in it of villainy, since both processes are necessary for freedom, just as it is said that, in nature, sometimes the fiercest fire stimulates the greatest growth in forests that might otherwise stagnate and die. 

There is no one but Éléonore to tell this part of the tale: that she already knows Robespierre well before that fateful summer night in 1791- a night that memory cloaks in a joy gradually stained by tragedy and violence until, by 1794, it is naught but a mantle of deepest sorrow. He first takes shape in her mind as a whisper, a figment. His name, in those heady, early days of the Revolution changes with every telling: she must pin him down, then, as Menelaus grasped Proteus through all his many forms, til the man remains, at last, only Robespierre and Maximilien. She hears that he is short and slim, a man rendered inconsequential by the great weight and immensity of a Mirabeau or a Danton. Alternately, he is a boyish and timid beauty- for thus the women who speak of him with such familiarity and blithe, unacknowledged contempt shape him.

“What do you make of this Robespierre, Cornélie?” Papa asks, leaning across the table towards her with a motion borne of the long intimacy between them. It is early in 1791, and he speaks in a voice that suggests he is asking several things at once.

“I feel sure she will love him as soon as she sees him,” Babet says.

(Later, of course, it will be Élisabeth who falls in love- deeply and with all the voracity of her great, broad heart- upon first seeing a very different man, but none of them yet know that).

Éléonore laughs along with Maman and Babet. It is because everything in their shared world is love, Éléonore thinks, that they make it the measure with which they judge all things. Victoire frowns into her teacup. Éléonore, on the other hand, takes no part in Victoire's irritation and the exasperation that accompanies it, nor does she quite feel the despair that she knows Victoire is sometimes plagued by, when it comes to this confusion of romantic feeling and its inevitable ends. Éléonore, rather, feels herself more to be some beastly homunculus fashioned in the wrong shape. Looking the part of Woman and yet eternally separate from Her, the shadow and the ghost of the arts perfected in Maman and Babet.

In point of fact, Éléonore does _not_ fall in love when she first sees Maximilien Robespierre. For one, the gallery in the _Salle du Manège_ is crowded, and her view of him somewhat obscured by the press of the throng gathered to listen. Her immediate impression is of a man who is profoundly regular in all his parts: neither so tall as Danton nor so short as Marat, neither thin nor fat, neither especially handsome nor particularly ugly. Moreover, the voice that carries- barely- over the noise in the room has none of the melodious, rich tones that she bestowed on him by virtue of his published works. That fact, more than any other, startles her profoundly enough that she momentarily struggles to attend his words. It is a slightly nasal voice, accented by the provinces and somewhat elevated. Éléonore has heard Desmoulins speak on occasion and his voice, too, is high: when he does not stutter it lilts like a flute, bouncing across syllables in a still-boyish way at odds with his years, reminiscent of Jacques's at twelve when he was still just a plague of sharp-tempered outbursts and sticky sheets sent to the laundry. Robespierre’s voice, on the other hand, is sharp and raw: as though roughened by pushing the force and passion of each and every word through the thin passage of his narrow throat. As silk is quick to burr at the slightest catch of a fingernail, so any conventional beauty to Robespierre's voice is marred by the peak of its flights. It is hard to say what she feels the, even to herself. Babet, who has only replaced the princes of her youth with the lawyers of today’s Revolution, might well weep at this mighty crevasse between expectation and reality. Éléonore, however, is not disappointed: she is made of too practical a stuff. Rather, she sees before her a man, instead of the figure he carves of himself and from which she had made her own painted idol.

Perhaps it is this initial impression, which she takes for accuracy, that leaves her so woefully disarmed yet again on the night she first meets Robespierre.

In these militant days of the summer of 1791, it is her habit to sit and read in the salon well after midnight, so she might meet Papa as soon as he returns from the club in the early hours. She is hungry for news, these days, to know what goes on beyond the gyre of the household. Filled to the brim as he is with fire and bravado, it is a time Papa happily gives her in spite of the shadows beneath his eyes and the creases these late nights seem to carve upon his face. So it happens that Éléonore sets aside the copy of Plutarch she is employed in reading at the first sound of voices and steps in the courtyard outside. That she opens the door, meaning only to gather her father close and greet him, to tell him there is already a pot of tea ready and then press him for information: he, like Hermes, a wing-footed messenger from the world of men to this place where she waits. Rather than her father, however, Éléonore finds herself facing another, quite different man. One that it takes her a few moments to recognise as Robespierre.

Éléonore’s first thought is that _this_ Robespierre- that is, the man standing before her- is not _that_ Robespierre. Upon the rostrum he possessed a subtle power and command, despite his mode of dress and the fragility of his voice, despite the force of each point he made driving him up onto his toes as if the very breath of his words were a gale. This Robespierre is only a fraction taller than Éléonore, and his wig- which he is in the midst of rather frantically correcting- is hopelessly bedraggled, its curls in disarray, a chaos of greying, powdered strands poking up like a halo of springs above his face. Even though Robespierre stands facing her he seems, at least in that immediate instant, so entirely unaware of her existence that Éléonore cannot help the laugh that escapes, though she quickly catches it by means of clearing her throat. Then he is like a man startled from sleep: green eyes (she later comes to know them as being rather blue) straining for focus through the slow beats of his short, pale lashes, a thin yet surprisingly pleasant mouth shifting over a number of expressions before relenting into a smile that bespeaks the depths of a most awkward mortification. The corners of Robespierre’s eyes crease with it, and it is only this that saves his face from an almost laughable gentility and boyishness, and then only because it is the look of a man wincing at a too-familiar fault. Seen at such close quarters, he appears even less of a man for these times: his shoulders are broad, Éléonore notes absently, but not so broad as to carry the weight of this new world upon them. What is it she feels, then? Not the hot rush of love that Babet predicted, nor the coddling contempt of his admirers in the gallery: she feels nothing so much as the desire to help, to set her shoulder ‘gainst the vast wheel of time and its oppressions they are set upon turning back. This, she realises all at once, must be the source of Robespierre’s strength: this quiet, steady compulsion that pulls one to the centre of the maelstrom, as if he is the spindle ‘round which the loose threads of the Revolution will wind.

"Excuse me," he says. "Perhaps I startled you. I fear I am in some danger, and your good father here..."

_My good father, _she thinks, _knows well what to do with all lost or displaced things, and how to treasure and find places for what may seem to others broken or unimportant. It is why he is so good and virtuous a patriot, and why we are raised the same. _Such discourse, however, is best saved for later. "Please," she replies instead, as she is expected to. "Come inside. Will you take tea?"

That, then, is their first night. Even what comes later, however, long after he is permanently ensconced within their nest, is not love. At least, it is not the love of Héloïse and Abélard, let alone that of Paris and Helen. It is a thing between a man and woman for which there are no words or precedents. What words exist are only for the men who come to cluster ‘round Maxime, devoted and earnest as the students of Socrates: Couthon with his gentle face and constant kindness, his voice rugged as the mountains he hails from, David whose mouth spits venemous rage even as his hands paint beauty and his eyes speak a private, endless grief that he both hoardes and hides. Saint-Just, too, with the bearing of an Ares and the face of an Apollo, setting men alight with his every word and gesture, possessed of a fire like Robespierre’s that both consumes and creates. Theirs is a space that, no matter in what great regard these men hold her intellect and unquestionable virtue, admits no woman. She knows the truth of it one night when, going to prepare coffee for them after dinner, she hears Maxime sigh and speak of her noble soul, and how she must know how to die as well as she would know how to love. Knows, then, that if only she cut off all the wealth of her hair and flattened the swell of her breasts back to their childish buds, if she dropped her voice to that place deep within the cave of her ribs and dressed herself in coat and culottes, only then might she join them. Might she sit at Saint-Just’s side, their faces similarly pale and oval and smooth and resolute, and be accounted one of Robespierre’s friends. A man of fearsome intellect, an object of veneration to their supporters and envy and hatred to their enemies.

So it is not precisely love, then, nor can it be accounted the fraternity from which she is eternally excluded, yet it possesses something of both. In its outward expression it is pots of coffee and jars of jam, it is walks with the family and the brush of fingertips, it is bathed foreheads and a trembling hand held close to the breast: these things which are commonly taken for signs of love, but which are meaningless between them, no more than the observance of proper forms. In the heart, however, it is this: her ear the audience for every draft of every speech, her comments and questions leaving a legacy of crossed sentences and sharpened points, the books they share between them and come to discuss and argue about late into the night. It is his quiet, gentle voice that says, more than once, “Cornélie, cher amie, lend me your mind.” It is an honesty that buds, then blooms, then flowers (though it is a rare plant that values night more than the harsh brilliance of the day). 

**Author's Note:**

> **Jeunesse dorée:** Reactionary gangs of young men who engaged in violence towards the sans-culottes and Jacobins, particularly in the wake of the fall of Robespierre.
> 
> **First seeing Robespierre:** My impression has always been that Maurice Duplay and Robespierre knew one another casually prior to July 1791, when Robespierre came to stay with the Duplay's. I've backdated Éléonore's awareness of him as a matter of artistic license, but it seems reasonable enough. Similarly, I depict her as having at least a passing knowledge/familiarity with other Revolutionary figures who were prominent at the time, in the sense of having either glimpsed them or knowing of their work. 
> 
> **Her noble soul:** The (reported) quote is "âme virile, elle saurait mourir comme elle sait aimer", though it is worth noting that, like most of the details of Robespierre's relationship with Éléonore, it is worth questioning the source.
> 
> **Salle du Manège:** Seat of the National Constituent Assembly/Assemblée nationale constituante


End file.
